US reviews 27 death penalty convictions due to FBI errors

The FBI has reviewed thousands of criminal cases and suspects that 27 death penalty convictions may have been secured by using faulty and exaggerated testimonies that may have wrongfully linked defendants to crimes.

A joint review by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Justice Department was launched after the Washington Post last
year reported that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners
might have led to the convictions of innocent people. The article
suggested that Justice Department officials knew of the flaws,
but failed to acknowledge them.

Last July, federal officials announced that they would
investigate old criminal cases to see if faulty testimonies
influenced death penalty convictions. More than 21,700 FBI
Laboratory files are being examined, and at least 120 convictions
have already been identified as potentially suspicious. Of these,
about 27 were death penalty convictions, the Post reports.

Investigators suspect that these convictions may have been
influenced by FBI hair examiners who exaggerated the significance
of their findings. These experts linked defendants to crimes
based on “matches” from microscopic analysis of hair found at
crime scenes. Many of these experts claimed that their hair
analysis tests definitively confirmed the identity of the
offender.

But such statements were often misleading: since the 1970s, FBI
reports have usually stated that hair tests are not adequate
proof to link a suspect to a crime, since these tests can be
flawed.

In cases where solely a hair analysis led to a suspect’s
conviction, US courts may have mistakenly locked up innocent
people – or in some cases, sentenced them to death.

“One of the things good scientists do is question their
assumptions,” David Christian Hassell, director of the FBI
Laboratory, told the Post. “No matter what the field, what the
discipline, those questions should be up for debate. That’s as
true in forensics as anything else.”

The federal review of convictions has raised awareness about the
problems that hair tests can pose when there is no other evidence
to prove a suspect’s guilt. Texas executes more inmates than any
other US state, and its Forensic Science Commission on
Friday decided to scrutinize hair cases at all labs under
its jurisdiction.

The review also led to a stay of execution in May. Willie Jerome
Manning, a 44-year-old man convicted of murdering two college
students in 1992, was scheduled to die by lethal injection in
Mississippi. But the Justice Department discovered flaws in
the forensic testimony that led to his conviction, which halted
the execution pending further investigation.

It is unclear how many inmates are on death row or may have been
executed already as a result of faulty hair tests, but the FBI
says it will announce partial results of its examination later
this summer. The review is currently prioritizing cases in which
defendants can be punished by execution. Once that review is
complete, the agency will examine cases in which defendants are
currently imprisoned.